Allison Hanes: Echenberg family letters bring history and heroism to life

In her book Walter's Welcome, Eva Neisser Echenberg has told the story of how her adventurous, bon vivant Uncle Walter Neisser saved 50 family members as well as others from the Holocaust by bringing them to Lima, Peru. (Dave Sidaway / MONTREAL GAZETTE) Dave Sidaway / Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette

A half dozen letters handwritten in German were the impetus for Westmount resident Eva Neisser Echenberg to write a story that had long been percolating in the back of her mind.

Her cousin had scanned and sent her a batch of letters exchanged by family members around the time of the Second World War in hopes she could translate them. Her own German was rusty and her granddaughter was eager to learn what interesting details they might contain.

So Echenberg, now 78, and retired from her job as a Spanish teacher at CEGEP Édouard Montpetit, got to work. After several years, much painstaking work, the discovery of more letters, historical research and long-distance communication, the result is Walter’s Welcome: The Intimate Story of a German-Jewish Family’s Flight from the Nazis to Peru.

The book is a story about escaping the Holocaust when many countries’ doors remained closed to Europe’s Jewish population.

It is also a tale of heroism. Echenberg’s uncle, Walter Neisser, is the central character. He helped rescue about 50 members of his own extended family (and others as well) from the Nazis by gaining them entry to Peru, a country to which he had gone after the First World War to seek his fortune.

The work is also a very personal endeavour — not only for Echenberg, but for her entire extended family, sprinkled throughout the Western Hemisphere.

“It started out with me saying my uncle’s story needs to be told and what is the best way. Most Holocaust stories are tragic,” she said in a recent interview, “but this one is uplifting.

“It’s a labour of love… If I don’t tell the story, no one will.”

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Walter NeisserCourtesy of Eva Neisser Echenberg

Echenberg’s uncle was a larger-than-life figure. He was a gregarious and charming bon vivant with a thirst for adventure and an incredible work ethic. He went from a peripatetic farm labourer in Argentina to a wealthy businessman in Peru. Walter Neisser managed to use his connections to obtain visas for dozens of family members to come to Lima, even though the country had a policy against accepting Jews. His doggedness and money also helped those relatives to get all the necessary travel permits for Jewish travellers exiting Nazi Germany. Once in Peru, he employed them all in his enterprise.

“I think what’s important in this story is that one person can make a difference,” said Echenberg, whose father, Eric, was Walter Neisser’s younger brother. “It speaks to the importance of family. When my grandmother said, ‘I can’t leave without my siblings,’ he (Walter) said ‘OK, fine’.”

But Echenberg — who grew up with her parents’ and grandparents’ generation essentially refugees in a foreign land, even if they were fortunate to be together — sees a wider resonance for her book.

“We live in a time of great Islamophobia. The 1930s were the equivalent but it was against the Jews,” said Echenberg, who has been involved with her local synagogue’s sponsorship of Syrian refugee families. “It’s very important to me personally that whatever your beliefs, whatever your colour, that you be accepted as a human being.”

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What makes Echenberg’s book so interesting, is that the letters form the backbone of the narrative.

Sent over a period of decades, the story starts out with missives home from when her uncle and his siblings fought in the German army during the First World War. There are her uncles’ accounts of trying to make a go of life in South America in the 1920s. And there are tales of woe from the 1930s as the Nazis began to crack down on Germany’s Jews. It concludes after the Second World War, when those who had survived the horrors of the war were trying to track down family members and struggling to rebuild their lives.

A letter from an American soldier attempting to connect a concentration camp survivor with his family.Courtesy of Eva Neisser Echenberg

It is positively remarkable that this entire body of intercontinental correspondence has been preserved, first for many decades by those getting the letters on both sides of the ocean, then again by those same recipients departing Europe for South America. Those letters were considered so important, they were among the few items that those fleeing brought along on their journeys. Afterwards, the precious papers were kept by the descendants of the long-since deceased writers.

“It’s extraordinary that almost 100 years later we still have the letters,” Echenberg said. “Three times there were more letters, letters that were in somebody’s closet in the very back. ‘Oh, you might want these too’.”

Whoever found the new trove would scan the artifacts and send them to her electronically.

One of the most incredible documents is a short note written by a relative who remained in Europe and was imprisoned at Auschwitz, where his wife and daughter died. On one side was a message from an American soldier working in a displaced person’s camp, offering a return address. On the other side was the survivor’s plea for help. It was miraculously delivered to the family in Lima, despite the lack of a street address on the envelope.

“We have that very first letter,” Echenberg marvelled. “That letter could have been put in the trash.”

Telling the story through the letters brings the narrative alive and offers a unique insight on how and what people were thinking in the moment as historical events unfolded.

“I thought the letters gave the story an authenticity,” Echenberg said. “It was written in that time… You really hear the voice of the person writing it.”

Echenberg’s book depends on the lost art of letter-writing. She was able to learn so much about her relatives and the time they lived in by mining their correspondence. Today, people send emails or even more ephemeral messages. But digital records are not cherished and kept in the same way. Technology changes so rapidly and CDs and hard drives people use to store their memories can easily become corrupted. This will make recounting history, especially personal stories, that much harder as time moves on.

Yet Echenberg acknowledges she could not have written her book without modern technology. The letters and photos she used were all scanned and sent to her electronically, making them easier to translate because she could enlarge the script and send them to friends and family to verify.

Montreal author Eva Neisser Echenberg as a child with her Uncle Walter Neisser and grandmother.Courtesy of the Eva Neisser Echenberg

Similarly, she said the Internet made her research for the text that ties all the letters together that much easier. The list of all the people buried in Lima’s Jewish cemetery, along with all their dates of birth and death, are searchable online, for instance. And by sending an email to a museum in the Netherlands, she was able to obtain a dossier about another relative who spent time as a prisoner in a concentration camp there, revealing details no one in the family had previously known.

“It’s a 21st century book about the first half of the 20th century,” said Echenberg. “The tools we have now are extraordinary.”

By stitching together all of these disparate personal mementoes in one book that is part family album, part history text, she has also ensured they will be safeguarded for the future.

“It’s a way of preserving these memories. Theses letters, they are now preserved in this book. These pictures are now preserved. They are preserved even if they are still in a box in someone’s closet,” Echenberg said. “This gives them a new life and one that’s going to be read by people who don’t know the story.”

AT A GLANCE

Eva Neisser Echenberg will give a talk about her book, Walter’s Welcome: The Intimate Story of a German-Jewish Family’s Flight from the Nazis to Peru, at Victoria Hall in Westmount at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 3.

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